I can’t speak for the other two (though I’ve heard great things about Fischer) but I had Lauer and his class was literally the only one that lived up to the grand portrait of college as a place with engaging teachers who draw the best outt’ve interested, motivated students that’s painted in movies and whatnot. So good for him/them.

Three instructors from the Allan Hancock College Lompoc Valley Center have recently received acclaim in their respective fields. Dennis Craig Smith and Christopher Lauer, both instructors in the English department, have published books, and Klaus Fischer, a professor of philosophy and history, was recently selected as a keynote speaker at the 30th annual Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide.

“I swear I did my best to ensure that his final moments were swift and free from fear. But consideration should be made for the fact that Sandor Katz was my first kill, so I trust the reader will understand that while his screams may well have seemed like conscious objections they were in reality simply a request to honour his strength and speed! With gratitude and tenderness I singed every single hair from his body, gently placed his decapitated head in a stock pot, boiled off his flesh and made a spread-able head cheese! Because I believe that one can only relate with another living creature by completely destroying it! I’m sure Sandor’s friends and family will appreciate this!”

(ahem) A rationale so moronic it defies belief. Post-vegetarian I must submit to you-respectfully-be careful what kind of world you wish for. Someday it may come knocking on your door.

“Lemme in! LEMME THE FUCK IN! I just wanna ‘fully relate.’ I swear I’ll do my best to ensure that your final moments are swift and free from fear!”

As a failed veg(an)tarian this song is particularly hard-hitting to me. This is their response to the burgeoning movement around “artisan meat” and whatnot. (I tried but failed to find the link to an article I read awhile back about young artisan butchers in SF and NY and whatnot and how the whole thing was based on respect for the animal, because apparently the facts that artisan butchers make ridiculous salaries, run in fancy circles in big fancy cities and get their balls jiggled in fawning profiles in the New York Times, etc. are coincidental side-effects that none of them considered going in.) It’s all just another fancified cop-out and frankly I wish people would quit lying to themselves.

Gogo Ron Paul. I love the “Sunshine Patriot” formulation btw — the scumbag leaders of this anti-“mosque” movement want to position themselves as the defenders of liberty, but they’ve made abundantly clear that they only believe in freedom when it’s convenient and doesn’t ruffle any feathers. (Or, more accurately: when suppressing them doesn’t provide a political opportunity.)

Is the controversy over building a mosque near ground zero a grand distraction or a grand opportunity? Or is it, once again, grandiose demagoguery?

It has been said, “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.” Are we not overly preoccupied with this controversy, now being used in various ways by grandstanding politicians? It looks to me like the politicians are “fiddling while the economy burns.”

The debate should have provided the conservative defenders of property rights with a perfect example of how the right to own property also protects the 1st Amendment rights of assembly and religion by supporting the building of the mosque.

Instead, we hear lip service given to the property rights position while demanding that the need to be “sensitive” requires an all-out assault on the building of a mosque, several blocks from “ground zero.”

Just think of what might (not) have happened if the whole issue had been ignored and the national debate stuck with war, peace, and prosperity. There certainly would have been a lot less emotionalism on both sides. The fact that so much attention has been given the mosque debate, raises the question of just why and driven by whom?

In my opinion it has come from the neo-conservatives who demand continual war in the Middle East and Central Asia and are compelled to constantly justify it.

They never miss a chance to use hatred toward Muslims to rally support for the ill conceived preventative wars. A select quote from soldiers from in Afghanistan and Iraq expressing concern over the mosque is pure propaganda and an affront to their bravery and sacrifice.

I’m not going to try to tell you that I’m different from all the rest. I’ve been subject to the same de-structure of desire and I’ve felt the same effects; I’m a hetero-sexist tragedy. And potential rapists all are we. But don’t tell me this is natural. This is nurturing. And there’s a difference between sexism and sexuality. I had different desires prior to my role-remodelling. And at six years of age you don’t challenge their claims. You become the same. (Or withdraw from the game and hang your head in shame). I think that’s exactly what I did. I tried to sever the connections between me and them. I fought against their further attempts to convince a kid that birthright can bestow the power to yield the subordination of women and do you know what patricentricity means? I found out just a couple of days/months/years/minutes ago. It means male values uber alles and hey! Whaddaya know… sex has been distorted and vilified. I’m scared of my attraction to body types. If everything desired is objectified then maybe eroticism needs to be redefined. And I refuse to be a “man”.

I have no idea who this person is or what he’s done with Jeff Goldberg, but he quotes some particularly beautiful words from Faisal Abdul “Hate-Spewing Radical Fork-Tongued Ground Zero Victory Mosque Imam” Faisal.

We are here to assert the Islamic conviction of the moral equivalency of our Abrahamic faiths. If to be a Jew means to say with all one’s heart, mind and soul Shma` Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu Adonai Ahad; hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One, not only today I am a Jew, I have always been one, Mr. Pearl.

If to be a Christian is to love the Lord our God with all of my heart, mind and soul, and to love for my fellow human being what I love for myself, then not only am I a Christian, but I have always been one Mr. Pearl.

And I am here to inform you, with the full authority of the Quranic texts and the practice of the Prophet Muhammad, that to say La ilaha illallah Muhammadun rasulullah is no different.

I’m not afraid to admit that they brought tears to the eyes of this cynical atheist. If this guy is your radical then pass the sleeping pills and whisky because I really cannot recognize this dialogue as anything approaching human and I’d prefer not to take part in what is shaping up to be quite possibly the ugliest period in American History.*

*I know we’ve been through some shit but it’s the constant bombardment by proclaimed ascription to ludicrous positions — the proponents of which cannot be rationally accepted as believing them — that does my nut in. Newt Gingrich is a smart son of a bitch, a college professor, and a motherfucking cocksucking historian and that is precisely why I feel an overwhelming, almost drug-like level of hatred towards him; one that leaves me wanting to do things to him that would make the de-spining from last week’s True Blood look like fun time in the motherfucking bounce house. I hate that son of a bitch so much that when I think about it I can’t even think straight, and there are a million more like him and they’re deployed on all sides and paid exorbitant salaries and I probably consider at least one of them a trusted source of information and the realization of this all makes me wonder what the point is of even fighting it on an individual, mental level. At some point they’re going to figure out how to tell me what I want to hear as well and then it’s all over. Just a matter of time.

I’ll be damned if she can have my single-digit amounts of web traffic, but I just saw a Whitman ad that takes some serious fucking balls. Essentially: When she took over eBay, it had 30 employees … by the time she left it had 15,000 employees and was xyz super awesome and successful!

Meg Whitman took over eBay in March 1998. Anything else going on at the time that might’ve been relevant? Nah, she did it all herself. Rolled up her sleeves and made the big, tough decisions: that eBay’s site should be in color instead of black and white, should be organized into categories instead of being one big unsorted mess and other real heavyweight decisions that demonstrate how truly forward-thinking and innovative she is. Apparently she thinks this is the solution to every problem, because she has also said that as Governor she would organize the state into teams that would work on specific categories of problems. I wonder if anyone has gotten around to pointing out that isn’t actually something she’d actually, y’know, “have the power to do?” I guess leveling with the public and admitting that her grand plan is to invite people to her shit-stupid “teams” and hope to God they accept wouldn’t play so well. She then went on an acquisition spree, grabbing up Skype — which eventually led eBay to take a billion-dollar writedown; Paypal — which makes most of its profit by arbitrarily freezing peoples’ accounts so it can profit from the interest it generates on their money…look it up sometime. It works well enough if you’re the paying customer but receiving payments is another matter entirely; a stake in a traditional auction business which completely and utterly failed; and a bunch of similar “value-added” services that she proceeded to shove down eBay customers throats’ with such ferocity that the site is only just starting to recover some of its traffic & credibility two years into her successors’ decision to put the focus back on providing a place where people can buy a Velvet Elvis without being scammed outt’ve their dental fillings. There were also eBay spinoffs that were developed in-house, ie. Half.com — another miserable failure. Since the high point during the dot-com boom eBay has gained… umm… nothing whatsoever. They peaked at 15k employees a decade ago and employ that many to this day — despite the fact that they are a larger company now due to their various spinoffs, acquisitions and what-have-you. They’ve slowly-but-steadily bled employees for pushing a decade straight, but never had one massive round of layoffs so hello talking point! By the time they got around to laying off 10 percent of the workforce she was only drawing fat checks from her position on eBay’s board of directors, so it’s not as though her decisions can in any way shape or form be traced to stuff that happened a full couple of months later! And gee, here’s something interesting — as soon as Whitman left they went from .5-1.5m/year in profit to 2-2.5m.

So yeah: vote Whitman. She’s really good at running a company to maybe 50% efficiency during periods of unprecedented-and-in-fact-fraudulently-high yearly growth, only about 75% of her ideas result in absolute failure, she can pick a mean color scheme, and whenever she’s done whoever comes next can’t help but look like an expert by comparison! Truly an inspiring series of accomplishments — not that it matters. She’s got $200 million to spend on a campaign that Jerry Brown seems uninterested in winning, so I look forward to hearing all my currently-exuberant conservative acquaintances bitching 2-4 years from now about how they knew she was a bum all along. Funny how that always works out.